Dear SFP fellows and colleagues,

The purpose of our year-end newsletter is to provide you with a brief overview of SFP’s activities this year—and to ask you to consider making a tax-deductible contribution to support SFP’s unique mission and essential work throughout the year. You may designate your donation for a particular purpose or simply support our overall activities. Many thanks for your consideration.

Annual meeting

In October, SFP convened our annual meeting in Miami, Florida, in conjunction with the fourth annual North American Forum on Family Planning, which SFP produces in partnership with Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA). With over 675 attendees and strong science and educational content, this year’s Forum was rated by attendees as the best yet in the meeting’s brief history.

One aspect of the meeting that I always look forward to is the SFP Awards Luncheon (view photos). This year, we recognized Dr. Horacio Croxatto with the SFP Lifetime Achievement Award, Dr. Jack Sciarra with the Allan Rosenfield Award for Lifetime Contributions to International Family Planning, and Dr. Marji Gold with the Robert A. Hatcher Family Planning Mentor Award.

The winner of this year’s Outstanding Researcher Award was SFP fellow Alisa Goldberg, MD, MPH, for her abstract “Cervical preparation before second trimester dilation and evacuation: A multicenter randomized trial comparing osmotic dilators alone to dilators plus adjunctive misoprostol or mifepristone.” The winner of the Outstanding Researcher in Training Award was Heidi Moseson, MPH, for her abstract “Testing a new method to reduce under-reporting in abortion measurement.” Both studies were funded by the SFP Research Fund.

Awards were also given for the top scientific posters. First place went to Jessica Lee, MD, for “Structural counseling for women seeking walk-in pregnancy testing.” Second place went to SFP fellow Diana Greene Foster, PhD, MA, “Effect of an unwanted pregnancy carried to term on existing children’s health, development and care.” Third place went to SFP junior fellow Kate Grindlay, MSPH, for “Unintended pregnancy among active-duty women in the U.S. military, 2011.”

The call for scientific abstracts and conference session proposals for the fifth annual North American Forum on Family Planning opened on December 8, 2014 and will close on March 18, 2015 at 11:59 pm EDT. Content decisions will be made in April, and abstracts accepted with be published in the October edition of our journal, Contraception, an international reproductive health journal. We expect the Forum to be the primary scientific and educational reproductive health conference in 2015, so please save the dates. The meeting will be held in Chicago, November 14–16, 2015, and will be preceded by two days of pre-conference events.

Research priority setting

In July of this year, the SFP Research Fund launched an intensive research priority setting process that involved numerous SFP fellows, grant reviewers, outside experts, and community-based advocates. Utilizing the Child Health and Nutrition Research Institute (CHNRI) methodology, we developed our own iterative process that involved ten topic area work groups that developed and ranked research priorities for the field. Experts who attended a face-to-face meeting in Philadelphia selected the top 20 priorities from the group lists. The SFP Research Fund will use the priorities to help guide our grant-making, and we are also sending the final report to other funders. (Read the report.)

Competitive research program

The SFP Research Fund’s 2014 Request for Proposals resulted in allocations of more than $2.4 million for large and small research grants focused on family planning and abortion, including career development awards and student/trainee awards. (Read the study abstracts.) The new RFP will be available soon.

On behalf of the SFP board and staff, I want to sincerely thank you for your work and for supporting our mission to advance science in family planning, including contraception and abortion, by funding research and promoting the expansion and dissemination of family planning knowledge. We are fortunate to close 2014 with more than 540 fellows, as well as hundreds of grant and abstract reviewers, colleagues and new allies.